The lucky outcome of Thursday night’s fire in Athens at a warehouse storing ammonium nitrate fertilizer was that no explosion occurred and no lives were lost. The facility, East Texas Ag Supply, was destroyed, but firefighters correctly opted to make the evacuation of 350 residents from surrounding neighborhoods their top priority.

“We understood West,” said Athens Fire Chief John McQueary, referring to lessons from the April 17, 2013, ammonium nitrate explosion in the Central Texas town.

But Athens appears merely to have dodged a bullet. The town had the makings of a disaster equal to or worse than West’s, where 15 people were killed, hundreds injured and scores of buildings destroyed.

In West, the fertilizer plant where the explosion occurred was on the edge of town, which helped limit damage. Texas Ag Supply was close to Athens’ town center, surrounded on all sides by buildings and residences. The town’s main commercial thoroughfares are just a couple of blocks away.

West’s lessons aren’t just about evacuating residents. They’re about retrofitting old storage facilities with fire-suppression sprinklers and security systems, which the Legislature should mandate statewide. Perhaps more important is recognizing that ammonium nitrate warehouses have no business being located in population centers.

Also troubling is that, despite West’s nightmare, East Texas Ag Supply kept receiving and storing large shipments of ammonium nitrate, including 70 tons that had arrived only hours before Thursday’s fire began. West’s explosion involved only about 30 tons of ammonium nitrate, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.

It remains unclear how the Athens fire started, but the 50-year-old cinderblock and corrugated-metal facility appeared to lack even minimal security fencing. Authorities are treating the site as a crime scene. The West storage facility had been the scene of multiple break-ins and thefts of toxic chemicals, yet its owners chose not to significantly upgrade security. Sabotage still hasn’t been ruled out as a cause of the fire that led to that explosion.

To its credit, the state fire marshal’s map of ammonium nitrate storage facilities includes the Athens site among at least 74 large-scale operations in Texas. The map was posted online last year in response to the West disaster so that local residents could learn about potential dangers nearby.

We recognize that rural communities don’t always take kindly to pontificators and Monday morning quarterbacking coming from big cities. So consider the homegrown wisdom of Jon Garrett, a screen printing shop employee near the site of Thursday’s fire, who expressed our sentiments precisely:

“The building should have moved from the area after West. I hope they don’t let them back,” he told The Dallas Morning News. “At some point, you have to use common sense and say they shouldn’t be here.”